BI Systems Should be Included within the Corporate Disaster Recovery Plan

It was a flood on the famous River Thames in the suburban town of Staines just outside London England nearly 20 years ago that originally got me thinking about the impact of a disaster on a business. Regular checks on proximity of water to the air-conditioner unit we knew that that we were just three inches away from shutting down all of the corporate computers. We had even contacted manufacturers in order to identify ways of removing the equipment, and finding alternative – ‘dry’ locations, in order to keep the business running. Eventually the waters receded without issue.

Implementing Business Intelligence solutions it has historically been accepted that a data warehouse would simply be re-populated on a new system as part of the business recovery plan, and normally after all other systems were up an running. This is no longer an option for a Business Intelligence solutions!

The complexity of out BI solutions continues to grow and that is a large part driven by the need for sophisticated solutions. We are no longer serving up monthly reports but complex dashboards, scorecards and KPI's that are all considered mission critical. Closed-loop BI solutions work alongside sales and customer care solutions to offer best courses of action for customer retention and upsale.

In determining how mission critical any system is there are a number of factors that need to be identified. These include:

- Goals generic to the industry sector
- Factors unique to the business being measured
- Applications and their contribution to global business goals
- Corporate legacy architecture

When assessing various parts of the architecture they forget to ask how important is this to the success of the corporation as a whole. E.g. how critical is the success of the passenger check-in system to the success of an airline? The answers will determine a league table of the system criticality.

How mission critical is your BI Solution? Think about it - I am sure it is not given the weight it deserves in your DR plan.

The truth is the BI system and it associated data warehouse will never be the most critical system in the organisation, but it can no-longer simply be repopulated from old data and must have a recovery plan associated with it. In our airline example systems relating to safety and ensuring planes continue to depart on-time will always be the most critical of systems. However the analytics provided have become very important in today’s business world for intelligent decision making.

Closed-loop analytics is becoming increasingly important to many corporations. In one telecom company this capability was so closely tied to the CRM system that Customer Service agents would simply be unable to function correctly without the BI input into the process.

“I want to close my account, and transfer my telephone number to provider X”, takes the agent to a decision based process, that will firstly determine whether the customer is one that the company wishes to retain. Assuming they have retention value the process will provide a set of alternative offers that can be presented to the customer, with the express intent of retaining them. Each step in the process combines the knowledge of the BI system with the capabilities of the CRM. Clearly a mission critical system – central to Disaster Recovery. Not having the two components working smoothly together will damage corporate responsiveness. Agreed the systems are not as mission critical as those necessary to keep the cellular network active, but crucial nonetheless.

According to Wayne Eckerson of TDWI “the litmus test is whether a data warehouse becomes so mission critical that when it goes down people begin to have problems”. This in my view is more the test of when the BI system need to have automatic failover applied to it (as DR is concerned with more than individual machine failure). Many of the database vendors, such as IBM, Oracle and Teradata include failover.

Failover would not have been possible for a server located in the world trade centre on September 11th 2001, but recovering from the disaster means alternative systems come back on-line within the prescribed time.

Many data warehouses contain derived and aggregated data, which forms the basis upon which specific business decisions can occur. This data needs to be stored and associated with the decision made as an historical check-point. Whenever advanced analytics functions are engaged it is often necessary to update the data warehouse. It is unlikely this data will ever appear in any operational system, placing the data warehouse firmly in the critical path for disaster recovery.

There may be some operations managers that feel adding the data warehouse to the list of critical systems means that other systems are removed. It however important to remember that the role of the data warehouse is to retain historical subject oriented data and is not a backup of associated operational source systems.

The continuity of business ultimately depends on the recovery of the data warehouse as a part of a recovery from a disaster in order to sustain the business and grow from the point of the disaster and moving forward, which often necessitates innovative advances in the marketplace to demonstrate the effectiveness of the corporation.

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